1. Field of the Invention
The present invention pertains to the field of systems. More particularly, this invention relates to predicting system health in response to a proposed system intervention.
2. Art Background
The operation of a wide variety of systems commonly involves system changes such as the installation of new components, the modification or reconfiguration of existing components, or the removal of existing components. For example, the administration and/or maintenance of a computer system commonly involves the installation new hardware and/or software components, the modification or reconfiguration of existing hardware and/or software components, and the removal of existing hardware and/or software components.
The components of a system commonly have dependencies with respect to one another. The software components of a computer system, for example, commonly have particular hardware requirements such as processor type or speed and/or memory requirements, etc. In addition, software components commonly have software requirements such as operating system and/or drivers, etc. Similarly, the hardware components of a computer system commonly have software and/or hardware requirements.
As the number and complexities of inter-dependencies among system components increases, so does the likelihood that system changes will significantly degrade the ability of the system to function properly. Unfortunately, prior methods for performing system changes are usually ill suited to prevent system disruptions caused by the inter-dependencies among system components. For example, during installation of a new software component in a computer system a check is usually made, either manually or using installation software, to determine at whether the required amount of disk space and/or processor, operating system, etc., requirements are satisfied. Any problems caused by more complex inter-dependencies must usually be discovered and dealt with after the system change is performed. Unfortunately, this typically leads to decreases in system performance and increased system down time.
An arrangement is disclosed for determining a predicted health of a system that would result from an application of a proposed intervention to an existing system. The predicted health of a system may be defined as the ability of the system to function fully operationally without known impediments, slow-downs, etc.
The predicted health is determined by determining a set of modifications involved in the proposed intervention wherein each modification involves components of the existing system. For each modification, a set of component information that pertains to the modification is obtained from a knowledge base. The component information may include prerequisites for the proposed modification, or inter-dependencies among components involved in the modification. The component information enables a determination of the predicted health of individual components as well as the predicted health of the overall system. The prediction of health of individual components or of the overall system may be derived directly from the component information or indirectly from predictions of other intermediate determinations that are in turn derived from the component information.
These techniques may be characterized as an arrangement for preventive reasoning in that they enable the detection and prevention of problems that would be cause by the proposed intervention without degrading the performance or increasing the down time of the existing system. These techniques also enable an informed decision as to whether the intervention should be made, modified, or aborted.
Other features and advantages of the present invention will be apparent from the detailed description that follows.